Afghanistan election a ray of hope for democracy

Canadians haven’t paid much attention to events in Afghanistan since our troops left there in 2012. But an event of singular importance played out in that country last Saturday when Afghanistan voters went to the polls to pick a president. There have been several presidential elections since the first one in 2004, many of them marked by corruption and scandal, and all of them taking place amid threats of violence from the Taliban, who view the government in Kabul as nothing more than puppets of the United States.

The two candidates for president were the incumbent, Ashraf Ghani, who succeeded Hamid Karzai in 2014, and Abdullah Abdullah, former minister of foreign affairs and one- time senior leader of the anti-taliban Northern Alliance. Since 2014 the two men have been in a sort of coalition government as a result of an agreement forged by then U. S. secretary of state John Kerry after an election that was particularly contentious and marred with scandal.

President Ghani was under considerable pressure to call last Saturday’s election off or postpone it because of Taliban violence and threats to do all in their power to disrupt the voting. There were also fears that widespread vote fraud would rob the election of legitimacy and undermine efforts of the winner to open negotiations with the Taliban.

So far there is no indication that the Taliban are even open to negotiations with the government in Kabul but they did spend months talking to the United States in negotiations that ended abruptly last month when a Taliban suicide attack was followed by the cancellation of the talks by U. S. President Donald Trump.

The American press paid more than a modicum of attention to the vote. A New York Times story on Sept. 27 was headed “Afghanistan Presidential Vote Presses On Despite Concerns About Legitimacy.” The Times feared that the usual Afghanistan corruption, fraud and fears of violence would render the vote illegitimate. Surprisingly, that did not turn out to be the case.

New procedures introduced by the Afghanistan Independent Election Commission, including the use of biometric data and photographs of the faces of voters, including women who would normally have voted with their faces totally covered, kept shenanigans to a minimum. On Sunday both sides claimed victory even though all ballots won’t be counted for another two weeks and final results won’t be completely known until Nov. 17.

One fact that was true about the Saturday election is that the combined vote was far less than previous elections with less than onethird of eligible voters turning up to cast ballots. Many of the provinces where vote counts were low, however, are hosts to widespread Taliban insurgency.

It is clear that fear kept some voters away from the ballot boxes, although others have become fed up by risking their lives to vote in elections they don’t perceive as solving any of the many problems that plague Afghanistan. There is much truth in that!

But the election turned out to be the cleanest Afghanistan has ever seen with a minimum of vote fraud, ballot box stuffing and other means of cheating. The Independent Election Commission took its job seriously so even though the total vote count was low, the results of the election, when they do come, will probably be held to be legitimate.

In the run- up to the election it was amazing to see the criticism of Ghani and the election process. It was almost as if Afghanistan is a Western-style liberal democracy at peace where political parties present themselves to the voters with a well-known acceptance by voters that they are being lied to at least some of the time combined with a healthy dose of character assassination. We are used to all that and a glance back at some Canadian elections will show that the nation has tolerated some very dirty elections in the past, much worse than now.

But Afghanistan is a country that is slowly climbing out of the complete brutality of the Taliban government ejected by U. S. special forces and the Northern Alliance, aided by oodles of U. S. air power, in 2002. Constant bombings, shootings, ambushes of Afghan security forces and attempts by the Taliban to wrest back by violence a country they plunged into the dark ages in the late 1990s make the holding of elections a somewhat difficult task.

Given the obstacles to an emerging form of democracy in Afghanistan, no one should question the results of last Saturday’s election. For Canadians, who paid a high price for our military intervention there, it is a spark of light in a picture of overriding darkness.

THE ELECTION TURNED OUT TO BE THE CLEANEST AFGHANISTAN HAS EVER SEEN.